 Hello and welcome to ongoing election coverage by Town Meeting Television. This is one of a series of forums and presentations we're bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on March 7th that's coming right up in just a week away. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers all questions or excuse me ballot items that you will see on your ballot. Town Meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues that shape your local community. Today I'm here with Catherine Schaad, the chief administrative officer for the city of Burlington who will give an overview of Burlington's ballot items for folks tuning in. Now if you're watching this live you're welcome to call in with your questions. Please call 802-862-3966 and we'll answer your question live for you. Otherwise you can watch Town Meeting TV on Comcast Channel 1087, Burlington Telecoms Channel 17 and 217 as well as youtube.com slash Town Meeting TV. With that said Catherine if you want to just give a quick introduction to yourself and then you can jump right into the presentation. Thank you. As you mentioned I'm Catherine Schaad I serve as the chief administrative officer for the city of Burlington a role I have occupied for the past three years. I started right before COVID and one of the main functions in that role is to oversee our elections. One of the other big parts of the role is overseeing the budget but we don't have any budget related questions other than the school so I'm here in my elections role today. And with that we will jump right in. I thought we'd start with reminding folks about some important election logistics. As you mentioned Town Meeting Day is next Tuesday. All active registered voters were mailed a ballot and they should have received it by now. If you don't have your ballot you can call the clerk's office at this number or send an email to get another ballot. You can return your ballot to City Hall at one of the five drop boxes around the city by mail and I would want to get that in no later than tomorrow just to allow that time for the U.S. Postal Service or bring it to your polling place on election day. If you forget any of that or looking for more information about where those drop boxes are you can look on our website. This year we have a total of eight questions on the ballot and we're going to go through each one of those. The first one will look familiar to Burlington voters and that is approval of the school budget for next fiscal year which is fiscal year 24. The total budget for the school district is just over $104 million dollars that equates to just over $21,000 per pupil and we don't have the exact numbers but it could result in a property tax rate increase. That's the best estimate that the school district has at this time. The second question is implementation of a carbon pollution impact fee. This is for new construction and for large existing commercial or industrial buildings so only buildings 50,000 square feet or larger and the purpose of this question is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city and it would implement a carbon pollution impact fee a fee that would start at $150 per ton and it would rate it would rise annually at the rate of inflation capped at 5% per year that would start next January and these fees would support converting the city vehicle fee to electric vehicles new support for installing heat pumps and other clean heat for low-income residents and other greenhouse gas emission reduction projects. Now we get into some of the other changes and these are charter changes so unlike the first two if the first two questions pass then they are automatically enacted. These charter changes if they are approved by the voters still need to go to the state legislature to be in order to go into effect so in essence this is really just the next in a series of steps. So question three we call charter change reward boundaries. People might know this as redistricting and it's something that we've been talking a lot about at the city council level and this would amend the boundaries for our elections it would keep the eight awards and four districts that we know now but it is in reaction to the 2020 census and it would reduce the population deviation of course people have moved since our last census in 2010 and so in order to ensure that the awards and districts remain about the same size this redistricting process is necessary and so city council has spent a lot of time working with our planning department to come up with a proposal that's what you'll see on the ballot. People should still go to their existing awards to vote their existing polling places as this these changes would not be effective until at least March of 2024. The next question question four is about legal resident voters who are not U.S. citizens again this is a charter change that would need to be approved by the state legislature and this would allow citizens this would allow voters who are not U.S. citizens but reside in the U.S. on a permanent or non-temporary basis in compliance with federal immigration laws to register to vote in only our city elections and our school elections. Question five another charter change and this one has a little bit of confusing name at least I think so because it says qualifications of voters and citing of polling places. In reality there is nothing about the qualifications of voters actually in this question. What this question is getting at is it would allow the city to locate a polling place for an election actually outside of a ward if we absolutely needed to that's not our first choice but logistically it's not always possible to find a place that's accessible on public transit lines and meets all of our other needs in terms of security that's in each ward and so this would give us a flexibility to put a polling place very close to a ward but technically outside if we needed to do that. Question six another charter change and this is about ranked choice voting which probably people watching have heard of because we'll be using ranked choice voting to elect city counselors for this election but this question is asking if we should have ranked choice voting for the mayor the school commissioners and ward election officers so really opening that ranked choice voting up. We did use ranked choice voting in the December 2022 special election for the east district and that went quite well we used it as a little bit of a test and we will again be using it this town meeting day for the rest of the districts. Now these last two questions are not just charter changes as these last few have been those are charter changes brought forward by the city council but these last two are a bit different in that they were brought forward by the citizens and that means that they were brought forward by at least petition of five percent of the voters of the city of Burlington and with that the city council did not have an opportunity to change the wording of the questions those were put together by a group of citizen organizers they got the signatures and then those questions go onto the ballot almost exactly as they're written only technical corrections such as punctuation are the changes that are allowed here and so question seven is creation of an independent community control board and this would create an independent department of the city and it would be comprised of seven to nine members that would create an independent community police department control board it's a lot of words but they have the power to review and make findings on any incident or complaint against a police officer including the chief of police and they would have the power to discipline or remove any member of the force those seven to nine members would be selected by an appointment committee the appointment committee would be selected by city council and those members would be entitled to fair compensation at least equal to the city's livable wage ordinance so there's a lot in that one it's a long question and i encourage people to read that carefully can i'm just gonna interrupt you here for a second can you explain so for the first couple of charter changes those ones once they're voted on and if they pass they go to the state legislator legislature to be voted on is that the same case with the last two articles on the ballot as well yes thank you for clarifying that is exactly right these two also would need to go to the state legislature and just to further clarify there they can act on it as it is the state legislature can make changes and they can make changes to any of these including the citizen charter changes so unlike city council that can't make changes before it goes on to the ballot the state legislature could make changes after its past they could choose not to pass it it could fail or it could take some time for them to take it up so it might be that we're actually just in a bit of limbo for a while if some of these questions were to pass they may not get to it in this legislative session for instance thank you for that clarity there and question eight another citizen charter change and this is proposition proposition zero which would initiate non-binding ballot questions and binding initiatives which would propose ordinances and be able to repeal ordinances one thing to note here in the case of binding initiatives this would be if the city council fails to adopt or repeal the ordinance at hand and i don't want people to forget i want them to remember to vote so i've just got another reminder about election logistics please remember to get your ballots back to us on or before march 7th and these are the ways to do that and i'm happy to take any other questions you may have or any viewers may have great i i do have a few questions but i just want to remind any folks who are watching live if you have a question for katherine she'll she's happy to answer it for you and explain please call in at 802-862-3966 and kind of along the same line of election logistics some of these ballot items have longer form versions of the text as opposed to the shorter form that the form that voters will see on their ballots is there a place where they can easily read the full long text versions of these yes i'm glad you asked if you go to our website which is just burlington vt.gov there is a banner it says election 22 information and you can find those not only in english but our seven most commonly spoken non-english languages as well so lots of information there about the questions on the ballot there's also information about rank choice voting i mentioned that it's one of the first times we're rolling this out in a big way and so if people have questions about how that works there's some helpful examples and videos and those are in multiple languages as well great thank you and just while we're on those lines maybe a quick if if you feel equipped maybe a quick overview of how rank choice voting will work for city council elections sure one thing to note is that rank choice voting really only goes into effect if you have more than two candidates most of our races unfortunately only have two candidates so we won't get to see it as much in action as we would have hoped but one thing i hope is an outcome of rank choice voting is spurring more interest in politics and these races so we can have more candidates but we do have one race that has three candidates um and so what voters will see on that ballot is an opportunity not just to pick the one of the three candidates that you want but you'll actually get to pick your first choice candidate your second choice candidate and your third choice so you'll see when you go on to the website the example that we give is around ice cream so you can pick if you prefer chocolate vanilla or strawberry and so for instance you can't say i want chocolate for the first choice and chocolate for the second choice you have to say chocolate is my first choice vanilla is my second choice and so then how it works is if chocolate gets knocked out in the first round instead of your vote not counting as some people um think of it your vote would count because your vanilla vote would then be counted and so on and so forth if we had up to you know 10 candidates or something exciting like that you'd get to rank all 10 of your favorites from first all the way to 10th great thank you so much for that and i think um i have a few more questions before we wrap up just want to give folks if they're watching a chance to call in if they'd like um so back to the school budget um can you um tell us a little bit about um how the school budget is is built and what happens if it passes or fails so i don't have very much to do with the school budget it's an interesting aspect of working in the city that the school budgets and the city budgets are a bit separate but if folks have questions about it um we had a great presentation from the superintendent tom flanagan and his staff and those are archived thanks to town meeting tv um on the city website um and there's a lot of information about the specific changes in the budget down to the level of detail of which staff were added which staff um i think it's only added but you know changes to staff and changes within building budgets all sorts of interesting details for folks that um maybe looking for that um i've also been in the fortunate position that um in my history um burlington has always passed a school budget um and i expect that they will again thank you kathryn and um i just want to say thanks again for um coming in and giving a overview on all of these ballot items and charter changes and um you know when you're looking at the huge chunks of text it can be super confusing and um so that's why we host forums and presentations like this and um like you mentioned more information can be found on the city of burlington's website um so folks can um get prepared before they head to the polls or fill in their absentee ballots but other than that um i um since we don't have any questions from folks we'll wrap it up and i just i want to thank everyone for tuning in to town meeting tv's ongoing coverage of local candidates local budgets and ballot items you can find this forum and more at www.ch17.tv and like we've mentioned we really don't want you to forget so don't forget to vote on or before march 7th that's next tuesday one week away um in the in the case of burlington ballots are mailed automatically and um like kathryn mentioned if you haven't received that uh check in with your town clerk um and please remember to tune in at 7 p.m on march 7th election night for town meeting tv's live results show it'll feature comprehensive local results uh interviews with voters at the polls commentary from local politicians as well as conversations with newly elected representatives so thank you again for watching and sharing town meeting tv if you're not already please subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash town meeting tv thank you all for watching have a great day